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Pulled Work Embroidery Sampler: Part Five

There has been an enormous amount of sickness flying around my family over the past few weeks and I am behind schedule! My embroidery sampler has been coming along well so far, and I have been feeling like I have learnt a lot about a variety of different stitches, as well as the technique of pulled work.

For my fifth square of the sampler, I have attempted four-sided stitch and a variation of it.

Four-sided stitch is essentially four stitches that form a square, with diagonal stitches on the reverse of the fabric which draw the stitches into the middle. There are many different variations that you can do with this stitch, including changing the shape or size of the square or offsetting the squares in the subsequent rows.

Four-sided stitch is worked from side to side. The needle comes to the front of the fabric at the black dot. The solid lines represent the thread on the front of the fabric and the dotted lines that on the back. The grid represents the thread count of the fabric.

Spaced four-sided stitch is a variation of the four-sided stitch that adds a space between each square. In this case, the space is one thread of the fabric which creates a very cool effect on the finished work.

This spaced four-sided stitch is worked from side to side, but has one thread between each square of stitches. This makes an interesting “cross” pattern on the finished work, which you can see below.

As mentioned in the previous posts, for both of these stitches, when you are finished a row make sure to bring your thread from the top of one row to the bottom of the next row.

My finished square looks like this:

The top half of this square has four-sided stitch, and the bottom half has spaced four-sided stitch.

I really like the spaced four-sided stitch. It has such a nice pretty effect.